PAUL MIRENGOFF: Black Lives Matter: from a lie to a revolution.
Archive for 2016
August 2, 2016
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Military History.
BILL QUICK: Some Observations On Where We Are Now.
KURT SCHLICHTER: So Conservatives, What Have We Learned From This Trump Thing? “Did we ever actually listen to our people? I mean all our people, not just the people who went to the same colleges as us and who hang with us at the same awesome restaurants and read National Review. I mean the actual voters out there in wherever actual GOP voters live. Did we pay attention to them and their concerns? Did we listen to them about illegal immigration, about the impact of free trade, about the wars we supported? And did we fight? I don’t mean just give lip service to how bad and unwashed liberals are, but really get in there and stand up to these flag-hating, gender-inventing, God-booing jerks? Or did we look down on the very people we were depending on at election time? . . . There’s a lot of class warfare going on here, a lot of backroom snark, with a lot of conservatives who want to believe that the only people who could ever support Donald Trump are knuckle-dragging morons who can’t cut it when it comes to anything besides digging ditches. Too many of us choose cultural solidarity with the liberals we live among over political solidarity with the people we expected to vote with us.”
STILL ON SALE FOR $3.99: Virginia Postrel’s The Future And Its Enemies.
DON’T DO STUPID SH*T: U.S. Sent Cash to Iran as Americans Were Freed.
The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
This is Iran-Contra on steroids, the other difference being that President Obama was in on the scandal from the start.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Beer Tastes Better With Music.
Then again, it tastes pretty good in silence, too.
THE INSTA-WIFE: Double Standards On Men, Marriage, and Money.
HOW WE GOT HERE: My USA TODAY column: Who’s to blame for Hillary and Donald?
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Flashback: The massive scale of the Clintons’ speech-making industry.
Last week, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released her most recent personal financial disclosure, detailing ways in which she and her husband earned money in 2015. Most of their income came from book royalties and giving paid speeches. Bill Clinton, for example, gave a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers in March 2015, being paid $325,000 for his time.
You probably don’t need to be reminded that $325,000 is more than most people make in a year. The median income for a family of four in 2014 was $53,657 — what Clinton made about a sixth of the way into that one speech.
And that was one of 22 speeches Bill Clinton gave last year. The NAM speech was the most lucrative, but Bill earned more than $5 million combined from those 20 days of work. Since the Clintons left the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been paid more than $150 million from speeches alone.
If journalists were doing their job, they’d be asking Hillary if Bill would still give paid speeches if she were President. Oh, wait, for that to happen, she’d have to take questions from the press.
TROLL LEVEL, GRAND MILO: Milo Yiannopoulos to Ben Shapiro: Talk to Me When You Get Banned From a ‘Cool Campus.’
I PREDICT THAT THEY’LL DO IT THE WAY THEY’VE DONE IT UP TO NOW — BADLY. How journalists can do their crucial job in the next 100 days.
MAYBE THEY’LL COMPARE PRIVATE JETS: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Aniston to Host Fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Glaxo and Verily Join Forces to Treat Disease By Hacking Your Nervous System.
CBS NEWS: Let’s face it — the U.S. economy is going nowhere fast.
It took until now to face that?
LOVE AMONG THE SOCIALIST RUINS: “Rejecting standard notions of love… goes hand in hand with rejecting capitalism.”
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: GE Is Developing a 3D-Printed Turboprop for the New Cessna Denali.
AT AMAZON, save on Sports Nutrition.
POLITICS AND THE WAGES OF CRYING WOLF: My USA TODAY column: Who’s to blame for Hillary and Donald?
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: “Medical benefits of dental floss unproven,” says headline at…the Washington Post?
WHY ARE LEFT-LEANING COMPANIES SO UNPATRIOTIC? Stiglitz: Apple’s Tax Strategy Is A ‘Fraud.’
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What’s the Matter With San Francisco?
We are watching the old San Francisco slip away before our eyes. Every time a housing unit becomes vacant, it goes on the market at a price so high that no organizer, writer, teacher, activist or artist could dream of affording it. Trying things that don’t have monetary potential just isn’t possible anymore.
How did we get here?
—The Atlantic’s “City Lab” blog, in a 2005 article with an unintentionally hilarious “unexpected” dek: “The city’s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its famed progressive politics.”
Which brings us to Fox Butterfield*, Progressive Urban Planner:
“You cannot lower the cost of housing by building more. Supply creates its own demand,” said Amit Ghosh, chief planner for The City.
If more market rate dwellings are built, Ghosh predicted, “rich people living outside would want to come to San Francisco to fill them. And how does that relieve our supply problem?”
—The San Francisco Chronicle, “Highrises called cure for city housing crunch,” March 8th, 1999. Ghosh was the chief of the San Francisco planning department from 1992 to 2008.